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Autobiographies are not just “remarkable true stories,” though. It is also a fragment of life in Ireland in the ‘fifties and early ‘sixties. Nowadays we tend to romanticise life in the earlier decades of this century - abetted by television images of cloth capped, hobnail booted, simple folk with their unpolluted countryside and vigorous social networks. We forget the smell, the filth, the grinding poverty, and, in Ireland, the arrogant and sadistic tyranny of the clergy. The real past—not some David Hamilton version— assails us from every page of this book, a nasty world of political, cultural, and religious sterility. If you are perplexed by present day Ireland with its unique mixture of European liberalism, Catholic intolerance, and nationalist violence, read this book, because it was out of this past that our Irish present grew.
Its value as a historical document apart, Paddy Doyle’s book also illustrates an important psychological truth: that your equilibrium depends on your ability to own your own history, however awful. None of his patient researches will take away the neglect and brutalisation of his childhood; none of the chronicling of his years in grim hospitals will restore to him his ability to walk; but for all this, Paddy Doyle comes across with a great personal integrity and a wholeness that does not seek to blame or punish, simply to tell a story that is, at last, his own story. It is an eloquent testimony to the power of the human psyche to rescue wholeness from chaos, and this makes it, for all its horrors, a profoundly hopeful book.
Ronán M Conroy - British Medical Journal